The present invention relates to a method of setting a photographic printer to proper exposure conditions.
To set a photographic printer correctively according to changes in exposure property of the photographic printer itself, or according to a difference in color characteristics among color papers used for providing prints with a homogeneous image quality, the photographic printer is maintained daily to set proper exposure conditions. For exposure condition setting, correction keys or a normal key are used to change all, or any one, of the densities of three colors, such as yellow, magenta and cyan, so as to set different exposure conditions in which nine different test prints are made from a control negative. Three color densities of these test prints are measured and are compared with respective color densities of a reference print so as to detect a change in density for one step of correction key. An exposure correction value is determined so as to avoid a difference between the test and reference prints by the use of the change of density.
In such an exposure condition setting method, because of making test prints by using all of the density color correction keys to change exposures negatively or positively, the number of test prints becomes large.